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Porn actor Luka Magnotta has been named as a suspect in sending a human hand and foot through the mail, discovered in Ottawa on Tuesday. These are screengrabs from a September 2007 video done by Joe Warmington and Veronica Henri at the Toronto Sun. (QMI Agency)

Luka Magnotta is a “ticking time bomb” who needs to be brought into custody, says a close family member of the primary suspect in a gruesome Montreal murder.

“I hope that he is caught because he is a ticking time bomb,” the woman said during an exclusive interview with QMI Agency. “Because he’s unstable, if he gets cornered, I just don’t think it will be a good outcome, so the faster he is caught the better.”

The woman, who has known Magnotta since he was a child, spoke on a condition of anonymity.

She described a highly dysfunctional family in which Magnotta was raised by his grandparents with little if any structure.

“This family from the head down is very dysfunctional,” she said, as she sipped a coffee in a Peterborough Tim Hortons. “The essence of this whole story is parenting or the lack of.”

To the international audience that is following the case, Magnotta is a murder suspect, a porn star, a kitten killer and even a rumoured love interest of schoolgirl killer Karla Holmoka.

But to his family in the Peterborough area, the man at the centre of a bizarre case in which parts from a dismembered body were mailed to national political party offices is just Eric Newman.

The woman said Magnotta was an “odd,” effeminate teen growing up in Scarborough, Ont., and then Lindsay, Ont., where he attended I. E. Weldon Secondary School for Grades 10 and 11.

“He’s a nut job. I did not trust him,” the woman said. “Eric is the type of individual, I think he’s mentally ill. He has delusions of grandeur. He concocts stories that he tends to believe and they in turn become fact in his mind.”

Magnotta was born in Scarborough to parents Don Newman and Anna Yourkin, and has a younger brother and sister and two younger half-siblings.

His mother and sister live in Peterborough. Both declined to comment Thursday.

“Please get off the property, you’re trespassing,” Anna Yourkin told QMI Agency Thursday morning through the door of her home.

That home was the site of a $60,000 fire in June 2010. Police said the fire was intentional and charged a 14-year-old boy with arson endangering life.

Magnotta’s cousin, Louis Yourkin, 21, is currently calling Central East Correctional Centre home. He is before the Peterborough court on charges of gun and drug trafficking.

He was charged after police seized handguns following a vehicle stop. Court has heard he bought the handguns to settle a drug debt.

Both Magnotta and Louis Yourkin were raised by their biological grandmother – Phyllis Yourkin – who lives in Peterborough’s north end, the family member said.

“(Phyllis) tries to be the typical matriarch of the family. She is very domineering, controlling and if you have a submissive personality, she will beat you up and do what she wants,” she said.

QMI Agency went to I. E. Weldon Secondary School and found Magnotta’s photo in the 1999 and 2000 yearbooks, in which he is identified as Eric Newman. In his Grade 10 picture he sports a lumberjack shirt and Mohawk-style haircut. The following year he has the bleached-blond dye characteristic of his current online persona.

The school’s vice principal would not discuss Magnotta’s history at the school.

“We can’t comment,” Richard Christie said.

Since news broke of Magnotta’s suspected role in the gruesome murder and disembodiment of an unknown man in Montreal that police said was videotaped and posted online, the family has been shocked by the graphic details, the woman said.

“It made me nauseous,” she said.

But the woman said she doesn’t believe for a second that Magnotta had any romantic connection to schoolgirl killer Karla Holmoka, a story that circulated five years ago. Magnotta has a habit of making up rumours about himself, she said.

“He will create a conflict, then he will take himself out and he will deny the content of the story, which he in fact started,” she explained.

While some media reports suggested Magnotta might have fled the country, the woman said

Peterborough and Lindsay residents should keep their eyes out for him as he feels comfortable in both cities.

“People need to be aware that he does have a connection to Peterborough, he does have a connection to Lindsay,” she said. “Eric thinks he’s smarter than he is.”